


Full Of Promise And Potential

by magnificentbastards



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Darren And Geoffrey: The College Years, M/M, mild violence, mutually destructive relationships, really bad shakespeare production concepts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:26:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnificentbastards/pseuds/magnificentbastards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Geoffrey reaches for the nearest shelf, throws a conveniently placed bowl of fake fruit at Darren, and then gets to his feet and walks out of the prop closet with his lit cigarette held too-tight between his teeth as Darren yells, “You can hurl wax bananas at me all you bloody like, darling, it doesn’t change that I’m right and you know it!”</p><p>(a few snapshots of <i>Darren and Geoffrey: The College Years</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full Of Promise And Potential

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurel_crown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurel_crown/gifts).



> happy yuletide!!! this started out as a somewhat more regimented 'five times'-esque fic in structure and then turned into something slightly different; I hope you like it regardless. these two are _so much fun to write_.

**I**

The first time Geoffrey and Darren meet is at a house party, three days into their first week at college; it’s also the night they have their first fight.

At the time, Geoffrey’s cresting a second wave of drunkenness after spending the first part of the evening at the campus bar for getting-to-know-you drinks with the other theatre majors on his course. He’s not sure whose house he’s in, or where the people he came with have gone, or how he’s getting home, but (sprawled on a sofa with something fizzy and cloyingly sweet in a plastic cup, casting around for somewhere to stub out his cigarette) none of that seems to matter much. His head’s spinning, which is why he sat down in the first place, and the guy next to him is not, as it turns out, having a conversation, but rather reciting Ginsberg.

“– plant the seed of Law and gather the sprouts, of what? The golden blossoms of what idea? If I dream that I dream what dream –”

Geoffrey says, “That’s fucking awful poetry.”

Someone near the door, with perfect timing, twists a dimmer switch so the only lights in the room are the blue-and-pink flashing ones hanging near the disco ball on the ceiling. The dancing crowd yells its approval, the music is turned up louder, and the guy next to Geoffrey (his angular face thrown into shadow, a silhouette of unruly hair and skin-tight shirt) leans forward and says, “Excuse me?”

“I said that’s _fucking awful poetry_. Even the one about his asshole is better than that – not that that’s saying much.”

With a cough, the girl sitting on the other side of the sofa (presumably the audience of the recitation) gets up and walks away, apparently unnoticed by the guy who’d been talking to her.

“ _Sphincter_ is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century,” says the guy, and that’s not really a sentence Geoffrey had expected to hear this evening; he can’t help laughing.

“Seriously? It’s badly written, it’s massively overblown, and it’s boring.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you, an engineering major?”

“Theatre, actually, and if you think comment on poetry requires qualifications –”

“Jesus Christ. Come here.”

Somehow they make it out of the room, into a corridor that’s just as dark but much quieter, and that’s where Geoffrey’s memory gets really unreliable, so that all he recalls from the rest of the exchange (aside from the assumption that they must have exchanged names at some point) is:

“Ginsberg revolutionised literature.”

“Change isn’t always a good thing.”

– and the next thing he remembers is hot fingers on the side of his face, the wall bumping his shoulders as he steps back into it, lips against his own and booze-scented breath in his mouth.

Someone whoops as they walk past, and Geoffrey jerks and stumbles sideways, and Darren tuts at the interruption and slides his hand down the side of Geoffrey’s neck. Geoffrey says something that might be, “No, uh, I’m not—” and steps backwards, more steady than he feels; Darren staggers to the side, stares, mutters, “Fine. Okay,” and then disappears back into the room he came from.

“Oh,” says Geoffrey, aloud, even though there’s no one there that he’s saying it to.

  


**II**

It takes, in retrospect, an almost embarrassingly short amount of time for everyone who knows them to come to expect their constant friendly and not-so-friendly hostility towards each other.

(Geoffrey finds out later that the cast and crew of the theatre course’s first-semester production, _every goddamn one of them_ , had been placing bets on whether he and Darren were fucking already or whether they would be by opening night.)

They have a screaming match in the second rehearsal for _Much Ado,_ the first play they’re ever involved in together _._ Geoffrey’s on one side of the room and Darren’s on the other, and the conversations and line run-throughs going on around them fade into silence beneath their raised voices – Geoffrey’s screwing his script up in his furiously clenched fists, Darren’s completely failing to notice the filthy looks their director is giving them, and everyone else is watching in what’s probably amusement.

“I don’t _care,”_ Geoffrey growls, “what your AD _job description_ is if it means you’re going to butcher the character I’m playing, your interpretation makes no fucking sense – it makes _negative_ sense –”

“Says you,” snaps Darren, “you whose take on Benedick’s character is probably no more than what you were fed by the third-rate academic who wrote the introduction to the first copy of the play you ever read—”

“—look, if I agree with your ideas here I am literally _denying_ the possibility of _any character development whatsoever,_ Darren, Jesus Christ, the whole point is that Benedick’s mind changes regarding romantic attachment across the course of the –”

“Your concept of character development is _boring_ , Geoffrey, boring and bourgeois and uninspired; the play is not an unhappy trudge from A to B, it’s a series of symbols and references entwining and separating atop a narrative which is in and of itself a distraction from –”

“Your head is so far up your own ass I’m surprised you can even read the damn text through the wall of shit!”

“Really! Funny, because _your_ head seems to be comfortably mired in bland textual interpretation circa nineteen thirty five, so I know damn well where _I’d_ rather be –”

At this point – because their rehearsal time is running out or because Darren looks like he’s about to put his fist through the glass coffee table he’s standing near, either way – their producer tells them both that if they don’t at least stop hurling personal abuse at each other and have a meaningful and calmly-voiced debate, they’ll both be off the production. The threat works, though it’s probably the only time it ever does: in future (especially after they’ve both gained themselves a reputation for talent, and have left behind the status of ‘loudly precocious freshmen’) a rehearsal isn’t considered complete without a Darren-Geoffrey spat, whether it’s muttered behind scripts in a corner or yelled from opposite ends of the room, and everyone else involved with the production learns to enjoy it at best or deal with it at worst.

“I think,” Geoffrey overhears one stage manager say to another, in the campus theatre bar years after that _Much Ado_ has garnered wildly positive reviews, “it’s just part of their _process.”_

He wonders about that.

  


**III**

The thing is: they slip into it so easily, this back and forth, the jibes and sniping and eye-rolling, picking up on everything the other one says that leaves him open to criticism – which is a lot, actually, in the case of Darren Nichols. Darren represents something that Geoffrey – painfully clever, angst-filled small-town teenager, his adolescence considerably less interesting than he’d spent years convincing himself it was – had never really experienced before. Call it an equal, a rival, whatever: Darren is something new, something _interesting,_ though Geoffrey would never admit it.

(“They did this thing with the lights where they’d flash red, directly in the audience’s faces every time someone said the word _‘death’_ – or ‘ _die’, ‘dead’,_ whatever – it was really chilling, a few old women fainted in one show but it’s all part of the act, don’t you think, the Germans –”

“No, I don’t think so. That sounds – ridiculous. And _distracting,_ how’s anyone supposed to focus on the text if there’s fucking strobe lighting going off in their faces every few lines?”

“—actually, that was also the trip where I gave Rainer Fassbinder a handjob in the bathroom at the Munich Anti-Theater.”

 “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. Two years ago. Life’s fucking nuts.”)

It’s not that Geoffrey’s jealous; it’s the opposite of that. Geoffrey thinks Darren is _wrong_ in almost every word that comes out of his mouth, every sentence he pens, every fashion statement he makes, every fucking drink he mixes, for God’s sake. But the fact that he doesn’t _like_ Darren doesn’t change the fact that he’s never met anyone like Darren in his life, that he ends up driving himself crazy spending more time around Darren than around anyone else, that he finds himself (in the back of his mind, the thoughts he won’t even let himself articulate inside his head because they’re so stupid and embarrassing) thinking about Darren as an example of – well, of how to fuck up all the opportunities Geoffrey wishes he’d had, or hopes he will have in the future. He’s thinking of them as an exercise in – in differentiating content within similar forms, perhaps.

(“You’re making this up,” Geoffrey says, “you’re saying this to piss me off, there is no fucking way you’d do a Nazi-era _Faustus,_ that doesn’t even _work_ –”

“Power,” Darren shrugs, as if he doesn’t have to explain himself any more than that, “and the desire for power; evil, and sin, and corruption. Intellectual context twisted to bring about arbitrary domination…”

“Those themes apply to any regime in human history – to anything that’s ever happened in human civilisation, that’s the _point_ of them!”

“And what better a snapshot, an indicative context from which to extrapolate the human condition, than –”

“There is no goddamn way I’m letting you finish that sentence, Darren, it is _not going to happen._ ”)

He doesn’t start defining himself in opposition to Darren (or so he tells himself) -- it’s not as though it gets that bad. It’s just that Darren conveniently thinks the opposite to him at any given time, and in his less clear-thinking days, when there are deadlines looming and the words won’t come out right or he can barely remember saying them if they do, it’s a shortcut to the right answer. _What wouldn’t Darren do,_ he asks himself during rehearsals, or: _how pissed off will Darren be if I say it like_ this _instead of like_ that?

  


**IV**

The university theatre’s props cupboard is not at all big enough for them to hook up in, but they do – semi-regularly, in fact, in their sophomore year after they’ve started fucking but haven’t yet moved in together. With Darren’s directing jobs piling up by the day and Geoffrey rapidly becoming the actor everyone wants to cast, one or both of them usually manages to get their hands on the closet key, and since Geoffrey’s sleeping schedule is generally either non-existent or wildly out of whack the two of them tend to spend late nights and early mornings in the theatre rather than anywhere else.

“We definitely shouldn’t smoke in here,” says Geoffrey, half-dressed and half-awake in a post-coital sort of way at 2am, pulling his lighter out of the pocket of the jacket he’d dropped on the floor fifteen minutes earlier.

Darren plucks the lighter out of Geoffrey’s hand before Geoffrey can use it, flicks it open, and mutters around the cigarette in his mouth: “I’m relatively certain you also shouldn’t go down on me in here, darling, but if you _will_ insist on sticking your hand down my pants when we’re going over the fight choreography for Act II Scene III…”

“Hm,” says Geoffrey, and sinks back into the prop throne they’d used in last semester’s _Richard II._ The metallic gold paint has started peeling off the arms and off the high pointed back that they’d hacked out of plywood and stuck on at the last minute, and it’s not particularly comfortable at all; he’s a little concerned about splinters. He says, “So, applications for next semester’s tragedy productions? I still want Shakespearean, whatever the others say; Oedipus can wait, we’ve got years.”

“If it’s an Oedipus they want,” says Darren, tapping ash into a martini glass on a shelf next to the cushion he’s sprawling in, “give them a Hamlet.”

Geoffrey sits up straighter, his cigarette hanging between his fingers where his hand had stilled on its way to his mouth; “Please, please, I know not to expect quality or right-headedness from your literary opinions, but _please_ retract that immediately or come up with some kind of out-of-the-blue non-incest reason why it’s a good idea.”  

As if he hadn’t heard, Darren continues, “You could dress the whole cast in Greek chitons – play with body language – Act I Scene II, Hamlet sits aside wearing a red blindfold, tears it off and throws it at Gertrude when he –”

“You know what, even aside from the fact that I am going to take both you and Ernest Jones and fucking _ritually blind you in front of your own weeping mothers_ ,”says Geoffrey, raising his voice above the deliberately casual tone of Darren’s musings, “that sounds more like something that the Interpretive Dance majors would want to get their hands on than something that should be going on as part of a Theatre program.”

“Well, I wouldn’t expect anything more than philistinism from you, darling. Perhaps a mute, unmoving Chorus painted against a wall – or a real one, if we can get enough over-eager Classics majors to stand there wearing bedsheets –”

“If you tell me what you plan on doing with the closet scene I will leave now. I’ll leave, I’ll – lock myself in my room and learn lines on my own all night, I’ll unplug the phone, I’ll fucking – _retract_ the blowjob I gave you earlier –”

“—their omnipresence representative of the Orwellian nature of Hamlet’s Elsinore, but their silence indicating that even these ancient commentators are struck dumb by the visceral human horror of the taboo relationship between our tragic hero and his mother—”

“Oh, fucking hell.”

“The Oedipal reading is entirely valid,” Darren snaps, crossing and uncrossing his legs and tilting his head back so Geoffrey can frown at the rising bite mark on his neck, “and postulated by scholars _far_ more pre-eminent in their fields than _Geoffrey fucking Tennant_.”

Geoffrey reaches for the nearest shelf, throws a conveniently placed bowl of fake fruit at Darren, and then gets to his feet and walks out of the prop cupboard with his lit cigarette held too-tight between his teeth as Darren yells, “You can hurl wax bananas at me all you bloody like, darling, it doesn’t change that I’m right and you know it!”

  


**V**

They live in the same apartment for one incredibly ill-advised, barely-sober, dangerously co-dependent year. Geoffrey looks back on it, later, in the context of all his life’s bad decisions, as probably the worst decision he ever made.

There’s a hundred indicative snapshots for him to avoid remembering: in one of them he wakes up at two in the afternoon having gone to bed at five in the morning and stumbles, hungover and stiff-limbed, into the living room where Darren’s asleep on the couch. Darren’s snoring gently, in his underwear, with his bird’s-nest bedhead sticking out in every direction and yellowing bruises on his hips; there’s a mug full of cigarette butts and a mostly-empty glass of gin by his hand where it brushes the floor, a stapled-together script lying crumpled at his feet, and a scowl on his unconscious face.

Geoffrey drags himself past the bookshelf (unorganised play texts, dog-eared volumes of criticism, unmarked VHS tapes, hand-labelled music cassettes, torn-open letters) and the coffee table (old mugs with stale coffee congealing in them, empty wine bottles, beer-stained scripts, a packet of rolling papers and a nearly-empty tin of hash, last month’s handwritten assignments with the ink smeared and unreadable) and rests his head on the cold plastic of the kitchen counter, breathing in and out very deliberately before he steels himself to turn the faucet and drink from it.

Further along the counter, in front of the mountain of dirty dishes, the remnants of the Chinese takeout they’d ordered at one in the morning the night before sit half-eaten in their foil packages; the chopsticks lie on the kitchen floor, where they’d fallen after Geoffrey had tried to stab Darren with one and Darren had punched Geoffrey in the stomach by way of response.

Geoffrey runs a hand through his hair and glances around, wincing. There’s a handwritten note pinned to the wall above the sink by a kitchen knife. It reads:

_Geoffrey,_

_If I’m as predictable as you say why do you insist on defying my every direction? Put aside this pettiness/self-righteousness for the good of the play for fuck’s sake and act how I tell you.  
You and I both want this thing to work so let’s make it work._

_You are the most uninspired genius I’ve ever met.  
DN_

The note had led to their biggest fight in weeks, screaming so loudly at each other that the downstairs neighbours had started thumping on the ceiling and they’d turned the shower on to cover the noise of them yelling at each other in the bathroom. There’s a ring of fingerprint bruises and nail marks around Geoffrey’s bicep where Darren (not strong, but _vicious)_ had dragged him across the room, a shattered beer bottle on the floor by the refrigerator where Geoffrey had thrown it at Darren and missed, all the buttons torn off the shirt Geoffrey was wearing, and a rising bruise on Darren’s jawline where Geoffrey had punched him and then kissed him against the wall to shut him up.

Geoffrey’s not sure he can bear to be in the house when Darren wakes up. Out of the laundry basket by the door he grabs the least dirty pair of trousers and a button-down to pull over his t-shirt, shrugging on his overcoat by the door; then he picks an unopened envelope off the doormat and scrawls a message on it before stabbing it to the wall on top of Darren’s note from last night.

_Darren,_  
 _Yes I want it to work but I don’t know if it can work with you directing it._  
 _Wont you fucking listen to me for once._  
 _Geoffrey_

  


**VI**

It’s a few days before the heaviest snowfall of the decade – the air dry and biting, bare tree branches shivering in the wind, windows frosted over and dripping with condensation in the thin cold daylight – when Darren challenges Geoffrey to the duel.

They stop living together at the start of their fourth year, and five weeks into their second semester they stop talking altogether when their production of the _Bacchae_ completely falls apart.

 _Philosophical differences,_ Darren says, in the memo he sends out to the cast and crew; Geoffrey supposes that’s all it’s ever been.

The day after Geoffrey throws out his script and production notes, he goes to the university theatre bar and finds Darren sitting at the bar (facing the doorway, so their eyes meet as Geoffrey walks in) with four prop rapiers leaning against his stool and a collection of empty glasses in front of him. It’s not a quiet afternoon; there’s a group of musical theatre majors laughing over each other at the biggest table in the room, a few actors Geoffrey knows sitting on the couch in the corner, the bartender cleaning glasses at the sink.

Darren gets up, crosses the room, slaps Geoffrey across the face, and throws one of the rapiers at his feet. The clatter of the sword as it falls is very loud in the sudden, shocked silence.

“Name the place,” says Darren, spitting it out like a curse.

Geoffrey doesn’t say anything for a long moment, struck briefly dumb by the weird tightening of his chest and the desire to laugh aloud, or to wrap his hands around Darren’s throat, or to throw himself out of the nearest window. It’s the fact that they’ve joked about this in the past, _pistols at dawn_ over who should bring in the laundry or which sophomore to cast in a contested role, and then the fact that Darren, right now, is clearly deadly serious – well, fuck, Geoffrey thinks, if they’re going to do it they may as well do it properly, and he says, “East quad, midnight. No seconds. Just me and you.”

They end up with an audience, of course. Geoffrey walks into the quad at 11:56pm to see at least twenty of their theatre major acquaintances, the entire cast and crew of the aborted _Bacchae,_ and several of their TAs from the last three years ranged around the outskirts of the square, bundled up in thick coats, leaning towards each other and whispering in a low, constant susurrus. The streetlamps along the paths glow yellow, casting long distorted shadows across the paving stones.

Darren is standing in the centre of the quad, a thin black-clad silhouette with one hand on his hip and his sword in the other. Geoffrey can taste the two shots of vodka he’d swallowed before walking here, burning at the back of his throat; Darren’s voice carries when he says, “Good evening, Geoffrey.”

“Good evening, Darren,” says Geoffrey pleasantly, stopping six feet or so from Darren to pluck the button from the tip of his rapier in an exaggerated gesture and then hold the sword out in front of him, testing its weight; “First blood?”

“Already drawn,” Darren says, and the heels of his boots click against the paving stones, above the murmuring of their audience (on the edge of their proverbial seats, Geoffrey thinks), as he steps forward.

Twenty minutes later – when the crowd has gone, when the swords are lying abandoned on the ground and it’s just the two of them, standing there opposite each other in the artificial light with the fierce teeth-baring adrenalin-fuelled grins faded from their faces, when their heads are still ringing with the clash of metal on metal, and Geoffrey has his own blood on his face and Darren’s on his hand – Geoffrey will think about that, _“already drawn,”_ and realise it’s been true for years.

  



End file.
